The football executive-turned-TV star wants to unleash the full potential of
Britain's small firms in her role as Small Business Ambassador

There was a time when Karren Brady, vice-chairman of West Ham United, was better known as “That Bloody Woman.”

She jokes that the first door she ever kicked down was the all-male directors’ box at Watford’s football ground in 1993. But that was just the start of a pitch battle to get accepted at the top of English football - and British business.

She shocked the football establishment by becoming the boss of Birmingham City aged 23, and then went on to become youngest-ever managing director of a publicly-listed company and the first female director of a Premier League Club. More recently, she’s won a fierce play-off with Tottenham Hotspur to secure the Olympic Stadium for West Ham.

Stories of the relentless pursuit of her goals are legendary. When Birmingham was short of cash she sold her footballer husband to raise funds. Twice. “Every time we got hard up I had to sell him,” she shrugs. “He was a good player and the only asset I had.”

Little wonder that colourful businessmen have wanted Brady on their team: Sir Philip Green recruited her to the board of Arcadia, Simon Cowell snapped her up as a director of Syco, and Lord Sugar hired her as star on the BBC’s The Apprentice.

But her appointment as the Government’s Small Business Ambassador has come as more of a surprise. When she walked on stage at the Tory Party Conference last October and introduced George Osborne’s speech on the economy, there were some mutterings: what’s a football executive-turned-TV star doing here?

Except, she tells me sitting in her office in the rafters of West Ham’s stadium Upton Park, football is not really her game. “I knew nothing about football when I started,” she says breezily. “I still don’t. I never put myself forward as a football expert. But I know how to negotiate, how to build brands, how to connect people, how to drive a business.” She adds: “Football is what we do on Saturday but it’s not our whole business. We do marketing, finance, strategy, media, project development. We have a huge retail business and architects and ticketing systems.”

Her skills have been enough to win fans among a legion of small business owners. Brady generated easily the biggest cheer at the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference last week, outshining the likes of Michael Gove, Ed Balls and Lord Mandelson.

But still, what’s her game plan as Small Business Ambassador? She told the BCC delegates that her “first priority” in the role was to “represent small businesses at the highest level” in British politics. Agreeing that there were big “challenges” she said her “one message” to all policy makers and business leaders was that “we have to find a way to work with these small, dynamic but often wrongly seen as riskier small businesses.”

Back in her office at West Ham, she’s brimming with energy. “My philosophy is that if you want to change something you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and get involved,” she says. “I want to do something tangible, I don’t want to be a gimmick or just a mouthpiece.”

Brady knows more than most the transforming impact a fast-growing small business can have. Born in Edmonton, north London, Brady’s father was a printer whose success catapulted the family from a terraced house to a life of private schools and Caribbean holidays.

After starting in local school, Brady was despatched to boarding school aged 12. “By 18 I’d had enough and wanted my independence,” she says. “I decided against university. I’d worked out that I needed money to be independent and the best way was to get a job.”

She secured a place on Saatchi & Saatchi’s graduate scheme, despite not having a degree. “Saatchi is great like that, it’s a company that takes all sorts of people and wants them to do well,” she says. Even so, after a year she quit. “I really enjoyed it but I didn’t want to spend three years doing the same thing,” she says. She took a radio sales job at London Broadcasting Company (LBC), calculating six months’ work would allow her to re-apply to Saatchi but skip the rest of the graduate training scheme.

An early client was David Sullivan, the publisher, who spotted Brady’s talent and hired her to work at Sport Newspapers. She became a director a year later aged 20. When Sullivan bought Birmingham City out of administration a few years later, he despatched Brady to run it.

“It didn’t feel like a leap of faith at the time but looking back it must have been,” she says. “There I was with my big hair, big shoulder pads and earrings purporting to run a business. But Birmingham was a tiny, falling down business at the time.”

She admits that the early days were the toughest. “There was a lot of hostility - from the people who worked there to the press,” she says. “They all said: 'What is this bloody woman doing?’” The footballers were even worse. On her first match day one said: “I can see your tits in that top.” She swiftly replied: “Well, when I sell you to Crewe you won’t be able to see them from there.” She sold him soon afterwards.

Brady has plenty of similar war stories but found that focusing on the business won her respect. Birmingham was in administration and had 10 staff when she started. Sixteen years later she sold it for £82m.

She didn’t plan to go back into football but when Sullivan and business partner David Gold bought West Ham, it proved too big a lure. “I really liked the opportunity of going for the Olympic Stadium,” she says. “In January 2010, the stadium had been built but there were no plans for it. It’s been a long fight but last March we won it and we move in 2016. The bigger capacity means we can build a bigger business. Also there’s only one Olympic Stadium in the country and we can build a great brand.”

Meanwhile, at Upton Park, Brady’s been putting the club through its paces. “We’ve made a profit for the first time since anyone can remember, refinanced the debt and turnover has gone from £70m to £120m,” she says.

She’s also boosted the proportion of women in senior positions from zero to 60pc. Promoting women in the workplace is the task of all chief executives, she argues. “If you want change and you want diversity, it starts with the CEO. There’s no point talking about it, you have to create action to make it happen,” she says. “Creating targets for non-executives is meaningless. I only do one, Arcadia, because what’s the point of me filling a quota. It’s not about me doing more, it’s about more women doing more.” Instead she’s backed Mentore, a company started by Sir Charles Dunstone to help women reach the top levels of British business.

Finding ways to unleash the full potential of Britain’s army of small businesses could be just as tough. “It’s been six months and I’ve spent the time criss-crossing the country meeting small businesses and listening to them,” says Brady. “I’m not finished yet. But what’s surprised me is that a lot of the problems are the same wherever you go: issues around cashflow, lending, business rates on the high street and Government procurement.”

She wants to produce a report for the Government with practical plans to help SMEs. Top of the list at the moment is the issue of late payments. “It’s incredible to me that bigger companies string out smaller companies in their payment terms,” she says. “It’s not ethical or right. We need to work out how to help, how to legislate.”

She wants to axe red tape around Government procurement. “The Government has a target to give SMEs 25pc of its contracts but the red tape is appalling,” she says.

The thicket of employment legislation is another target. One radical suggestion is to allow SMEs to fire people more easily than big companies. “If you have a small business, say 10 people, and one of them is very difficult to manage, having 10pc of your workforce as difficult to manage can be very tough,” she says. “So should there be easier ways for small business owners to make decisions that are important?”

Despite her views, Brady insists she has not plans to enter politics full time. “Look, never say never ever,” she says. “But I can achieve my goals far better by running a good business and helping other people go out and run businesses themselves.”